Raghav Sandhane is one of the founders at Spring Computing Technologies, founded in 2007 with the objective of developing world class software applications. After focusing on product engineering services for embedded and real time software, market evolution led Spring CT into mobile applications development. Raghav has a great experience and is well informed, as an innovation professional, about how his country it’s doing in builiding its future. That’s why I decided to ask Raghav’s first hand help to give a look into India‘s present and, more notably, future technology and innovation ecosystem and the role that Information Technology had in fueling it.

When asked about giving us an overall idea about IT role in India, Raghav first points out a bunch of interesting facts:

As a background, it will be useful to discuss about India first: the industry in India, India as a market, IT infrastructures in India and then about the most talked-about area – India as an IT hub. Let us touch upon these subjects one by one to get a complete picture.

The economy of India is the tenth largest in the world by nominal GDP and the fourth largest by purchasing power parity (PPP). Like any other developing / developed country, the percentage of services in GDP is around 60% and growing. Services industries like Information Technology, Telecom, BFSI, Healthcare are spearheading the services components of the Indian economy.

Contributions from the manufacturing sector in the country’s GDP have largely been along the expected lines with steel and automobile manufacturing driving the growth. In both these sectors, India ranks in the first three countries.

Agriculture was always a significant factor in India’s economy. Though the percentage in the GDP has gone down due to the stupendous growth in services and manufacturing sector, the agriculture and allied industry is growing at a descent rate of 6 to 10 % annually.

Have you ever thought about India as a potential market for your services?

Demographics of a country play a vital role in deciding the market. India is a young country with 35% of the population less than 15 years and median age of the population being mere 25 years. This young crowd largely attracts new products ranging from hi-tech gadgets like mobile phones and gaming consoles to apparels and eatables.

Experts worldwide have linked the IT Infrastructure growth with the country’s growth. PC penetration, Internet connectivity, Network bandwidth, Penetration of mobile phones, converged devices, cloud computing/ ASP’s….all of these play a key role in deciding the country’s growth direction and growth rates. In India, all these parameters are galloping from its current levels to the percentage levels the developed countries have attained. Mere comparison on percentage basis may not show the real picture. It should be looked at from the perspective of the population. In India with the population already in excess of 1.2 Billion and growing at a rate of 20 % per decade, the volume of Infrastructure required is humungous. The fact that India is showing decent rate of penetration in these areas gives an idea of the overall growth of the country.

When talking with Raghav about the role of information technology in India, clearly appears how IT has been and still is a huge development accelerator.

Information Technology or IT as it is popularly called, has been a revolution in India. Through IT, India found a new way for leaving a mark as a country with talent. NASSCOM® (National Association of Software and Services Companies) is the premier trade body and the chamber of commerce of the IT-BPO industries in India. It facilitates business and trade in software and services and encourages advancements of research in software technology. With over 1200 members that include both Indian and multinational companies NASSCOM’s membership base constitutes over 95% of the industry revenues in India and employs over 2.24 million professionals

Indian IT Operations started with low end activities like providing IT support and has rapidly and consistently moved up higher in the value hierarchy. They are today broadly in the business of software product development, software services, consulting services, BPO services, e-commerce & web services, engineering services off-shoring and animation and gaming. IT services has been at pinnacle among others. It has grown from 1.2 percent of the GDP to almost 6 percent over the last ten years.

Compared to the IT Services industry, the software product companies still need to go a long distance. The revenue from IT software products firm accounts for just over USD 2 Billion, with top 10 companies contributing more than 80% market. According to NASSCOM the market is expected to reach USD 15 billion by 2015. Many start ups are coming up focusing on areas like Financing, Accounting, Business Intelligence, Security and Content Management. The reasons to be optimistic are confluence of various factors like strong and growing domestic market and a well established “India” brand.

The IT enabled Services (ITes) that started with basic data entry tasks over a decade ago, is today witnessing an expansion in its scope of services. It offers services such as knowledge process outsourcing (KPO), legal process outsourcing (LPO), and games outsourcing (GPO) and design outsourcing, among others. The Indian BPO sector has matured significantly in terms of scope of service offerings, buyer segments served and service delivery models. Apart from achieving maturity in the horizontal segment, providers are increasingly developing vertical/ domain specialization to capture greater value. In the BPO field, India has constantly held the number one position since 2004, when the rankings started. India has the first-mover advantage in the back-office operations’ avenue, coupled with reasonably priced skilled workforce and sound knowledge base.

E-Business adds another dimension to the IT growth story in India. More than the export, this sector sees a good potential for local market. With the ever growing internet penetration, large young population and flooding of hi-tech gadgets in the market, the e-business component of the Indian market is on a steep rise. Customers can shop twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, from their comfort zone. This has compelled the Indian IT companies to develop sites and hubs for online business transaction and it is showing unprecedented growth.

Let us quickly touch upon India’s capabilities in the product design space. Today, companies in most of the hi-tech domains including life sciences, telecom, automobiles, and semiconductor have their R&D centers in India. These centers are instrumental in deciding the direction of the company. From mere outsourcing destination to deciding the direction of the organization in a matter of few years is a giant step forward.

What comes out from Raghav big picture, is an ecosystem that is rapidly ramping up from the lower levels of the value chain to the higher ones, also thanks to a rising local market: India is developing it’s own way of high concept and high touch abilities that will eventually lead to the affirmation of an Indian design and conceptualization approach.

What is the direction for the future?

For any developing country, it is of utmost necessity to have adequate resources to take on the growth and satisfy the opportunities coming their way.

Increasing working population is obviously necessary for this. In addition, and more important, it is necessary to have an educated class of employees who would take on bigger roles as they grow. Fortunately, in India, there is a sound infrastructure for education. Institutes like the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) and Indian Institute of Management (IIM) have a significant contribution in making India an IT hub. These institutes are well known world wide and highly rated by the industry and the academia.

In addition to these institutes, India has a strong network of schools and universities that provide basic education in various vocational and non vocational courses to students and prepare them to take on corporate responsibilities. Just to give an example, Pune (where we have our office), one of the fastest growing cities in India, having population of approximately 10 M has more than 1000 graduate and post graduate institutes. Strong association between the academia and the industry has proved useful in grooming the students to take on larger opportunities and responsibilities in IT.

When Raghav talks about Spring CT he is very proud of the good job they do for their customers:

Our product oriented mindset that comes from our embedded development background is important in writing mobile applications and often puts Spring CT ahead of the competition. In many cases the customers arrives with a one-line requirement and we use our domain and technology experience to convert one-line requirement into a detailed specification and design for the development. Spring CT has customers in more than 10 countries, a 100+ strong team and is looking for substantial growth in the near future.

4 comments

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